Analysis of the decision making factors for heating and cooling systems in Spanish households

Highlights: • Spanish households: a survey analysing the keys to choose heating & cooling systems. • Analysis of awareness, perception and willingness to pay for renewable technologies. • High influence of socio-demographic features of sample in decision-making process. • Election of thermal systems based on comfort and economic criteria – savings & cost. • 63% of population know renewables for thermal uses and 50% would pay more for them. -- Abstract: The use of renewable energies in the heating and cooling sector in Spanish households is a key strategy to improve the final energy consumption of the country. The main goal of this paper is to identify end-users' decision making factors when making choices about heating and cooling systems, which is essential to deploy renewable energy technologies. Besides, this research analyses empirically the households' awareness, perception and willingness to pay for renewable heating and cooling systems in Spain. To this aim, a survey was conducted and the responses were crossed with a set of socio-demographic parameters of the sampling, showing the influence of different population groups on them. Nowadays, 63% of respondents are familiarised with renewable energy technologies for heating and cooling uses in the Spanish residential sector. More than a half of those respondents who know any renewable energy technologies would pay more for them; the preferred technology is solar thermal energy, followed by biomass. To the best of our knowledge this is the first research in Spain with these characteristics and it provides a better understanding about how to deploy renewable technologies in the Spanish market and can be used for sectoral agents and policy planning purposes.